Uprising in Nicaragua could spark next Central American refugee crisis

By

Jose Miguel Cruz, Florida International University

Men with covered faces guard a square in Masaya, Nicaragua, on Wednesday, a day after the so-called "Operation Cleaning." The government of Nicaragua took control of Masaya to remove road blocks and barricades. Photo by Jorge Torres/EPA-EFE

July 20 (UPI) -- Central American migrants have long been at the center of what consecutive U.S. administrations have called the immigration "crisis."

Typically, only a tiny fraction of migrants come to the United States from the neighboring Central American nation of Nicaragua. Their numbers are so small that Nicaraguans are rarely even mentioned in Customs and Border Protection reports.

Nicaragua, home to approximately 6.2 million people, is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

But it has largely avoided the widespread crime and instability that for decades has dogged this corner of the world. Nicaragua's 2017 homicide rate of 7 killings per 100,000 was the lowest in Central America.

When Nicaraguans migrate, typically they are seeking better-paying jobs.

Rather than travel all the way to the United States, economic migrants from Nicaragua mostly head to neighboring Costa Rica, the stablest and most prosperous country in Central America. An estimated 500,000 Nicaraguans live and work in Costa Rica.

Since April, Ortega's government has been trying to crush a nationwide protest movement that demands his resignation.

Demonstrations first erupted in Nicaragua on April 16, after the government announced social security reforms that would raise costs for retirees and workers. Police soon cracked down on protesters. Students took to the streets.

Outsourcing state violence is not a novel tactic. In Venezuela, the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro has also armed militant supporters and supported criminal gangs willing to "defend" the regime.

In Guatemala, the army mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in civilian "self-defense" patrols to fight guerrillas who opposed the country's military dictatorship. El Salvador's government built wartime death squads responsible for bloody massacres against civilians, or anyone assumed to support the anti-regime insurgency.

By the late 1990s, death squads and paramilitaries were using their government connections and expertise to prey on the Central American population and infiltrate these countries' new criminal justice institutions.

People often associated crime in Central America with gangs like MS-13. But my research shows that the foundations for the region's current criminal violence were laid decades ago, when Central American governments armed thugs and deployed them against their own people.

Outsourcing state violence may temporarily quash popular dissent. But it creates the conditions for more violence -- not just political violence but criminal violence, too.

Creating the conditions for rampant crime

Nicaragua managed to avoid such post-war chaos in large part because of institutional reforms undertaken in the 1990s after the Sandinista revolution.

The Sandinista rebels overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and dismantled the country's infamously brutal National Guard. However, they emerged from the revolution with firm control over the new police and army.

After the Sandinistas lost power in the 1990 presidential election, the new government of Violeta Chamorro undertook a complex set of reforms that, among other changes, established clear boundaries between law enforcement, the army and political parties in Nicaragua.

Those reforms strengthened the Nicaraguan state such that non-state forces could no longer violently confront -- or substitute -- government institutions.

The separation between politics and security forces began to erode when Ortega -- who had previously ruled the country during the revolutionary 1980s -- was re-elected in 2006.

As he accumulated power, ultimately abolishing term limits to run for a third term, Ortega and his Sandinista party systematically undermined Nicaragua's independent law enforcement institutions.

Dismantling Nicaragua's strong state

Those institutions had kept Nicaraguans relatively safe for over a decade.